Get You Back

by Taylor Hart

  It wasn’t that he had a certain plan. The plan was to get them all out alive. He hadn’t planned on telling Marco anything until he’d gotten the sense that starting a war between the Cruz and Santiago families would not be hard to do.

  Rico had been droning on and on about how much loyalty they had to each other. How the past year they had shown them all the different ways they could each trust the others. All the ways the Cruz’s had helped them. Sam could tell that Marco wasn’t buying any of it.

  The new plan had formed in an instant. Sam’s gut told him that the distraction of a war between the two families would give him, Alexa, and Frank a better chance of survival.

  The guard with the gun pointed at him gestured for the other one to open the door.

  Cautiously, with distracted eyes that would only focus on the door for a second before shifting back to him, the guard opened the door.

  The butt of the gun pushed him forward. “Don’t get too cozy. Marco will come for you soon.”

  If there was one good thing Sam could honestly say about getting put into this estate’s holding place, it was that it was a heck of a lot nicer than the last one he’d been trapped in four years ago in China.

  “Sam.”

  The voice that he heard sounded gravelly and weak. He rushed through what looked to be dirty servants’ quarters. Bed mats were out, and personal things were propped next to the mats. He took all this in quickly as he moved for the kitchen, toward the sound of that familiar voice.

  Frank sat at a kitchen table, his hands cuffed in front of him. He was dirty and had a good foundation of a scraggly beard that was the evidence of a week without shaving. He didn’t stand, and at first, Sam didn’t realize that he was squinting and trying to focus out of just one eye.

  Sam rushed the last couple of steps, murderous rage filling him as he realized there was a small bandage over one eye that looked worn and dirty.

  He sat next to him at the little table underneath a window with bars on it that faced into the jungle. He frowned. “What happened?” Seeing this man, not only Alexa’s father, but also a man who had become one of his closest friends over the past few months looking so fragile and broken, shook him. Something inside Sam felt off-kilter and incredibly vulnerable. Frank was older, but he’d always been so ornery. He’d seemed almost untouchably strong with his Nam background and rough exterior. He’d gone into battle with Sam twice against Marco’s men—at the compound in Idaho and when they went into Florida together.

  Now, with his eye damaged and a dejected look on his face, Sam felt something he usually didn’t let himself feel, especially not during a mission, sadness. He reached up to inspect the wound around Frank’s eye, taking care not to hurt him when he pulled the bandage off.

  Frank jerked back. “No, just leave it.” His voice was flat, devoid of his usual teasing. “How’s my girl?”

  Undeterred by Frank’s skittishness, Sam continued to lift the bandage, hoping there was something they could do to save the eye. “I don’t know. I just left them. I told Marco about Rico and Papa Cruz’s plan to have me kill them both in exchange for our lives.”

  “What the—” He cut off when Sam finally got the bandage ripped off.

  The smell was bad. The wound was putrid and oozing. The smell of infection hit Sam hard. The wound was even worse than Sam had imagined. Not only was the eye gone, but also the flaps of skin and veins looked raw and dripped around the beginnings of a raging sore.

  Frantically, Sam looked around for something, anything, to clean the wound and use to put a better bandage over it.

  Frank scoffed, picked up an old clay cup, and drank. “I don’t think there’s much here. I looked with my good eye, but all my strength has been pretty much sucked out of me.” He shook his head. “It looks that bad, huh?”

  Sam realized that Frank was studying his reaction. Immediately, he changed whatever face Frank had been seeing and put on an emotionless one. It was a blank exterior, practiced for situations like this. He’d been caught off guard, but he was back to being level headed. “It’s fine.” Sam saw a dirty roll of tape and a couple of clean gauze pads on the counter next to dirty dishes. A large cockroach was making its way across the counter. He reached for the supplies.

  Frank waved his hand. “My eye is done for, but I can still be a heck of a distraction while you get my daughter away from this psycho.”

  Sam went to the sink and took the towel that seemed the least dirty and rinsed it out. “How did this happen?” He moved back to Frank and began doing the best he could do with cleaning the wound and carefully getting it back into a bandage, trying not to make it bleed again. Sam knew it needed serious attention soon or it would be fatal.

  “Victor thought Marco could torture me into giving him information. Torture me into telling him what I thought you would all do.”

  “What did you tell him?” Sam wasn’t asking because he thought Frank would give anything up, even if he had known anything. He was asking because he wondered how ticked off Marco must have been to give Frank a wound of this magnitude.

  Frank spit on the floor and endured the process of being re-bandaged. The side of one lip tugged up. “I told him that he better hope to God that I would die from this.” He pointed to his eye. “Because if I didn’t, worrying about me slitting his throat would be mild compared to what you’d do to him.”

  Frank wasn’t laughing, and neither was Sam.

  Both men stared at each other for a few seconds, a silent contract being drawn up quickly and concisely with the bottom line being make 'em pay.

  A black darkness coiled inside of him. Sam would use it the next time he saw Marco. He vowed that he would not only kill Marco, he would make him pay first.

  Chapter 8

  Control. Alexa stared back at Marco and tried to summon the contained exterior of the PR woman she used to be. The one who could tell her clients the hard truth and then tell them how to fix the problem. Give them the salt then help them drink some water to dissolve it more easily.

  Only, she didn’t want to give Marco salt. She would rather it be poison.

  “Alexa.” Lounging back in the couch with the slow fan turning above his head, he had the unfettered look of a man who is pampered. The confident look of a man who thinks he has won. Who thinks he is untouchable. He flashed his white teeth then frowned. “I’ve been worried.”

  Keeping her shoulders back and her head positioned high, she forced herself to focus. He couldn’t be played by the willing, accepting wife act. No, not anymore, she calculated. She could see it in his eyes and tell it by the way he gave her the once over. He no longer had the hunger that had been there either. Ah, she recognized the difference. He looked tired. She nodded. “There was no need for your worry.” She kept her words slow, smooth. She didn’t want to play him, but it had to be done.

  Something inside of her had shifted when Sam was taken. That, coupled with the realization that she still didn’t know where her father was or, perish the thought, even if he was truly alive.

  So she did something that she’d never done before. It was something that her father had talked to her about and had told her how to do. She disconnected.

  From herself.

  On some level she’d done this when she’d left Colorado all those years ago. Granted, she’d been a wreck back then. She’d gone to therapy and tried to deal with it all. It had been a long, hard road, but she’d come out on top with her business. But at this moment she was going to have to journey in unchartered waters. The only thing she wanted was to get the two men she loved and get out.

  That was it.

  She didn’t care what had to be done. What the truth was. Or who the casualty might be. Not even if it was herself.

  All that mattered was them. Their lives. Their safety.

  She stood, tired of playing this game with Marco. Exhausted from worrying. Sam might have thought he was the only one coming up with a plan, but that wasn’t true. She was tired of being the pos
session. The thing fought over. The trophy.

  Helen of Troy had caused a war, and Alexa wondered if Helen had felt the same way she did. Maybe she, too, had been frustrated with being a “thing” to be owned.

  “Alexa?” Marco stood, too. Seeming to test her as if he were sticking his toe in the water and wondering if the water would burn him.

  She let a slow smile play on her lips. “I have a solution.”

  He took a step toward her. For a second, she could smell his tropical scent. If she hadn’t know him, if she’d never been involved with “hurricane Marco” before, she might be attracted to him.

  For the briefest of seconds, she thought about how wonderful it really had been in the beginning. He was a beautiful man. He was tall and strong with a quick smile that always made him look like he’d just heard a joke.

  He hesitated, scanning her face. Then his eyes flashed down to the ring on her finger. “Nice piece of glass.”

  She returned his smile, but reached for his hand. “I think it’s time, Marco.”

  He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t fully take her hand either. His mistrusting eyes came back to her.

  Slowly, she reached up to stroke his face. “You’ve worked so hard to get me here.” She spoke in a tone of gratitude.

  He blinked.

  Masking her urge to smack him, she gently traced the curve of his cheek and trailed it down to his lips.

  A statue would be a proper description of Marco at this moment. He still didn’t move. He only stared into her eyes.

  Unfortunately, Alexa had had the chance the past couple of days to analyze why Marco obsessed over her. After getting captured by him and saved by her father and Sam, she’d tried to push it all away. Run from it. She’d tried to look at the experience as something to overcome. But when he’d taken her father, it’d forced her back to it. This time, instead of falling apart or running, she’d faced it head on. And she knew.

  She knew Marco was a narcissist. She knew he probably could be classified in the same category as a dissociative sociopath. She and Sam had done their research profiling his personality.

  Sam had helped her because he wanted her to understand how crazy Marco was. But Sam hadn’t understood her real reason for trying to understand. She had to know what Marco was. She had to take off her blinders and see how he saw the world, so she could kill him if she had the chance.

  Obviously, to him, Alexa had always been a prize. She represented a life that was never in his reach. Normalcy. Love. These were not things that a drug lord could ever have, certainly not with her. Truly, he had wanted to own her. Have her be this thing that he put on his shelf and only let out when it was time to play. He saw her as an object to possess and from which he sought complete adoration. If she’d had father issues, he may have had more of a chance.

  After all of her self-analyzing, she realized the only way he had gotten so far under her skin was because he caught her at her lowest moment. She had lost confidence in herself and her ability to recognize what she wanted in a partner. The rape had messed her up. She had been denying the fact she still loved Sam, and she hadn’t dealt with the past.

  When Marco had shown up and been, in Sam’s own words, the “anti-Sam,” she had fallen for him. As Alexa had thought about Marco this past week, she had seen more clearly the truth of how she’d been tricked.

  She’d wanted to be.

  She’d wanted to have that tall, dark, handsome man—the one that loved her, adored her, made her feel special.

  Who didn’t?

  She had wanted the fairytale that fit perfectly into her life. The saddest thing is she knew part of her ego had been wrapped up in the fact that he had made her look good. She’d liked his image, his restaurant, and the idea that he was a business tycoon with a tight-knit family.

  His success hadn’t only been because of the spin that he gave her. It worked because it was the spin that she’d wanted. But she’d walked away from him and his spin. She’d chosen someone else and proven she wouldn’t give him the life he’d thought they could have together.

  So why did Marco still want her? There must be some need, something that he felt only she could fulfill. It had to be a big need to have driven him to these lengths. For the last week, that had been her puzzle.

  He could get a million different girls, but he’d still pursued her. What did she possess that he wanted so badly?

  Then, it had dawned on her. It wasn’t about her.

  It was like how she had wanted Marco back then because he made her look good. Unconsciously, she’d thought if she had a man with all those characteristics, it would make her more valuable. She had been too involved with her ego.

  When Sam had shown up and told her the truth. She hadn’t believed him because she hadn’t wanted to believe him. Part of her hadn’t wanted to let go of the dream Marco had represented and the sense of value he had given her when she was feeling so confused and lacking in self-esteem.

  So now she stood with her hand gently on Marco’s face. She gave him a soft smile. She understood his motives now because, to a less intense degree, she herself had shared them. This was all about him.

  His ego.

  It was about what ‘getting her’ would symbolize for him.

  Of course, he didn’t realize that. The key difference between them was that he was a narcissist. He was so in love with himself, who he had made himself to be, that he couldn’t see why someone else wouldn’t be in love with him too.

  It wasn’t about one woman. Fifty women. A hundred women. It really was about the woman that he couldn’t have. The one that had gotten away. Cocking her head to the side, she gave him a soft, gentle, sweet kiss. Then she pulled back slowly.

  Control.

  She had to keep it if she was going to get what she wanted. She had to keep him thinking he had it all. She had to do the thing Sam had never wanted her to do again. Be the thing Sam hated that she could be. She had to be whatever Marco wanted.

  The bad thing about being a good actress in, what was essentially, a deep cover mission, was that the line between reality and fiction blur. Sometimes you don’t even know when you’re acting

  This was the part that Sam told her scared him. If she was acting with Marco, had she been acting with him?

  Chapter 9

  Like a crazed animal, Sam paced around the small outbuilding that had one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. There were bars on every window, a guard at every door, and even more guards along the path around the windows.

  Frank still sat at the kitchen table.

  Sam noticed he’d lost some weight, which was normal, but he seemed healthy enough to break out of here if they could do it soon. Eye injuries like that took a lot out of people physically and emotionally. Frank was a tough cuss, but everyone had his or her limits.

  “Give me the lay of the land,” Frank barked.

  Not knowing what the surveillance situation was, Sam started telling him the logistics of everything else: where the buildings were, where the guards were, where Alexa and Marco were and how far away that was.

  Sam moved to the next window. Seeing a crack in the side of the stucco, he started tapping at it. “Have I ever told you about the Juarez cartel?”

  Frank took a sip of water. “Nope.”

  “The Juarez family used to run things around here.” Sam used a butter knife to dig into the wall. “It was the first big bust the FBI had sent me on with my brother a couple of years ago. We had this guy, Henry Juarez, that had been on our radar for owning some trafficking operations in the states.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was a messy thing. It kind of ended up exploding on us.”

  “Oh yeah, how?”

  “It ended up being a freak thing. The whole estate burned down.”

  “Really,” Frank said, giving him a questioning look. “You had anything to do with that?”

  Sam shrugged. “Ya know, the thing I’ve found about drug operations like this
is there’s a lot of smoke, and you’re never quite sure where the fire started.”

  Frank grinned. “Perfect.”

  Chapter 10

  Marco took the hand against his face, squeezing it hard.

  Alexa pulled back. “Ouch!”

  Marco shook his head. “You lie to me. I saw you holding the agent’s hand when you were walking in. I know you escaped with him before. I know you loved him even before that, and I know you are engaged to him now.”

  She grinned, easily sliding her hand back. Cocking an eyebrow, she mentally regrouped. If she wanted to succeed, she had to be more convincing. “No.” She moved closer to him and moved her hand to gently rub his chest like she were a lion tamer calming the beast. At this point, her only shield was misdirection. “Marco, do you remember when we met that night? At that event?”

  This seemed to pull him out of his dark train of thought. His eyes light up.

  “Do you remember how you asked me to dance and how I stepped on your feet? I stumbled and almost fell, but you caught me. You…” she broke off, covering her mouth. “Oh, dear, I felt so badly about that. I was so clumsy.” She put her hand back against his chest. “But you were my hero. You didn’t worry about my clumsiness. You had me put my feet on your feet, and you danced with me.” The memory actually evoked real emotion out of her. It had been real. How she’d felt. The dancing. It was that night that had made her think Marco Hernandez was amazing.

  She patted his chest, allowing herself to remember it. “And then remember how we went walking on the beach? We took our shoes off, and the water lapped around us.” Tears formed in her eyes.